The IoT-Enabled Super Bowl of Tomorrow

Fan Loyalty Detection

Finally, the smart stadium will not be the only connected variable defining the Super Bowl of tomorrow. With the latest numbers from Pew research indicating that over 60 percent of U.S. adults have smartphones, most spectators are already Internet enabled, whether they like it or not. The smart stadium will finally start leveraging this asset, and privacy concerns aside, the potential use-cases are nearly infinite.

For example, a fan's browsing history, coupled with geographical information, and other information stored on phones could be used to estimate the loyalties of a crowd. Instead of judging fandom based on the clothing worn by people in the stands, at the Super Bowl of tomorrow, we will be able to predict each team's fan turnout with more precision than ever.

If there is one thing sports fans understand, it's the value of data. No statistic is too obscure for your diehard Fantasy Football junkie and, as a result, there is no more fitting technology for the professional sports industry than the Internet of Things (IoT) – whether they know it or not.

The applications for IoT in stadiums range from the seemingly mundane (Internet-connected concession stands) to the truly sci-fi (Internet-connected players). However, in order for the technology to take home a Super Bowl ring of its own one day, the industry needs to embrace the technologies' glamorous applications, along with the applications currently only making engineers drool.

The following slideshow, provided by wot.io, a data service exchange for connected device platforms, lays out the best of both worlds, the sexy and the practical, in order to make the case that the smart stadium of tomorrow has benefits for fans, teams and maintenance staff alike. With Gartner predicting that there will be 26 billion connected devices by 2020, it's a safe bet that some of these will be landing in your local sports stadium, so it's about time we start figuring out what that will look like.

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